iSean

i have an assignment in my undergraduate education technology course that has my students using Technorati to find other educational technology related blogs. my students are supposed to find a blog entry and read it and then add a comment to the blog site. of course, i then need to visit every single comment to see what my students wrote and i will inevitably read the blog entry. i also check the other comments to see if a conversation develops and to see if the blog author has engaged in a dialog with my students. overwhelmingly, my students will write a thoughtful response and that’s that. No response back from the original blogger. I should add a caveat, some of my students find older blog entries and I can see how a blogger might tend to ignore an entry they wrote many months ago. fine. but many of my students are finding very current stuff and still being ignored. i don’t think busy bloggers need to respond to every comment, but i think the strength of the blogging tool is that it allows for a certain level of interactivity. if you are not trying to build this interactivity then i wonder why you blog in the first place — merely sharing information perhaps? and, i realize i may not understand the ins-and-outs of a busy blog as i rarely get more than 5 or so comments for any blog entry i add; however, most of the blogs my students found have just a few comments as well. perhaps i checked in too quickly. the responses were due on a Sunday and I checked things out 3 days later on a Wednesday. i’ll give my peers the benefit of the doubt this time, but i have my eyes on you mr. blogging community. ;~)

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, ed tech, students, technology in education

profetic.org has an interesting analysis of wikis and their fit into education here. the focus is on the university context, but much of the thinking is more universal in nature. i am not going to get too deeply involved in an analysis of what they have written, but i am curious about some things. first, nearly every benefit described (e.g., maximize interplay, democratic, real time, collaboration) could also be applied to other tools. i only bring this up because my personal experience trying to use a wiki in education was not that pleasant. and, i admit that i probably went into it with the wrong attitude . . . but, i have done similar work to what i tried with the wiki and found better success using Google Docs. just look at these help files pertaining to using Docs for collaborative writing. Google Docs has it all and they are about as easy to use as MS Word . . . in fact, students can start in Word and transfer writing into Docs fairly seamlessly. For example, look at the tool for commenting on a collaborative piece:

Comments are a handy way of inserting notes alongside your regular document content. People added as viewers and as collaborators will be able to see any comments. Each comment is automatically stamped with your username and the date, and can be invaluable for communicating with collaborators about specific parts of the document, as well as making notes about changes you’ve made or would like to make. When you publish your document as a web page, post it to your blog, or print it, the comments will disappear.

but that feature in Google Docs also addresses one of the pitfalls mentioned for wikis:

Since wiki authors are typically anonymous; unless the group is extremely limited and/or identification of textual input is imposed, one will not normally know who the author is. Thus, unlike threaded discussions in which the writer is identified, it is usually impossible to identity contributions to a wiki (Schwartz et al, 2004).

Such anonymity poses enormous questions for academic institutions wherein rewards (grades, bursaries, grants, publications and hirings) are still typically based on individual contributions and efforts. However, it is possible to insist upon authorial identification within any given wiki. But the advantages of “non-identifiable authorship” may outweigh the disadvantages in certain academic sectors. Garcia & Steinmueller (2003) outline three potential advantages:

1) an intensification and diversification of non-ownership/non-proprietary models; 2) an emergence of self/other identification hybrids; and 3) the proliferation of consumer/producer horizontal assemblages, reflecting the multi-authored character of information goods produced through collaborations.

granted, an instructor could set up the wikis so that everyone has to register and so that no anonymous comments are allowed. but, Google Docs keeps track of every comment and edit and revision, etc. in a way that makes it very easy for instructors to evaluate the contributions, etc. i know i sound like an advertisement, but i really do believe that Google Docs will make life easier for many teachers who are trying to implement collaborative writing in their classes. plus, Google Docs don’t require MySQL space or server issues, etc. — they just work.

Technorati Tags: ed tech, Google, Google Docs, wikis, technology in education

well, my first spring/summer class begins tonight and it’s a Computer in Education course for undergraduates who hope to become teachers. in the past, i have used various tools to teach this course and i take great care to try and choose the best tools for my students each semester. when i last taught this course, i used Drupal for all course content and student blogs and I used phpBB forums for my class discussions. this setup worked well for me.

i was content to try these tools again; however, i ran into some snags. first, my previous installation of Drupal somehow got corrupted when i was fiddling, so i couldn’t even get logged in to see all of the settings and modification i had made. my spring course is only 6 weeks long and i didn’t think it was fair to myself to start over using Drupal. i am going to get this straightened out for the fall semester and get back to using Drupal, which is also in version 5.x now — i used 4.x previously. Instead, i have reverted back to using Dreamweaver and CSS/HMTL for all course content. this is slightly disappointing, but i work very quickly using Dreamweaver and this was really the sensible choice for me for this course at this time.

since i no longer have easy to use student blogs like i would when i use Drupal, i received a recommendation from a teaching colleague who suggested wordpress.com. i checked it out and decided to give it a whirl. i like the thought of using wordpress even though it’s a bit more high end than blogger and drupal-based blogs. for students who are willing to put in extra effort, the wordpress blogs can pay off bunches.

and, my biggest change this semester also comes from a recommendation . . . this time from a former student. i have been using phpBB forums for all class discussions for about 5 – 6 years. i finally got around to checking out the competition and decided that i liked SMF forums better. i was actually excited about the upcoming phpBB version 3.0 forums, but these are currently in beta and i am not going to use a beta that hasn’t even reached a release candidate stage in my classes. i could use the current stable release — version 2.22 or something like that, but i honestly felt like the SMF forums were better. who knows if i’ll stick with SMF when phpBB 3.0 comes out, but that needs to happen before mid August or i’ll stick with SMF again. here’s a snapshot into how the forums look for my class (from the perspective of my account):

(click for a larger view)

when i add items to a news feed, they are constantly cycled on the front page of the forums. i like that my announcements are so prominent. previously, i had to request students to visit an announcements forum when there were new messages (announcements) therein.

so, i have made some big changes and reverted back to some old methods, but i hope the end results is a quality learning experience for my students. time will tell . . .

Technorati Tags: blogs, drupal, ed tech, phpBB, dreamweaver, students, teachers, SMF